Share

We can solve poverty in the UK

The UK should be a country where, no matter where people live, everyone has the chance of a decent and secure life. Instead, millions of people – many from working families – are struggling to meet their needs.

Poverty means not being able to heat your home, pay your rent, or buy the essentials for your children. It means waking up every day facing insecurity, uncertainty, and impossible decisions about money. It means facing marginalisation – and even discrimination – because of your financial circumstances. The constant stress it causes can overwhelm people, affecting them emotionally and depriving them of the chance to play a full part in society.

Over the past four years, JRF has worked with experts in research and practice, and commissioned and analysed evidence reviews to find out what works. We have worked with the public as well as employers and businesses, practitioners, civil servants and politicians from all parties, across all four nations of the UK. As an employer and a provider of housing and care services, we have also drawn on our own history and experience. Critically, we have involved people with first-hand experience of poverty in the development of the strategy.

The result of this project is an independent, long-term strategy to solve poverty in the UK which aligns greater corporate responsibility with an active, enabling state, promoting individual capacity and capability. Alongside this strategy we have published an in-depth report which details the evidence gathered during our four-year investigation.

This strategy contains a set of proposals we hope will inspire debate and action across the four nations of the UK. While each nation and place has a different set of challenges and powers, we hope that the proposals provide the basis for new solutions and real change. If we don’t all rise to this challenge, we face enormous costs and risks in the future.

Although the Homeless Hub works tirelessly to bring current and up to date content to our site, access to many journal articles is constrained by the subscription restrictions imposed by publishing companies. While the Homeless Hub cannot afford to buy access to the innumerable proprietary journals we link to, we do strive, at least, to bring the knowledge of this content to our users.

Furthermore, the Homeless Hub is committed to the principles of open access and we provide free access to all original Homeless Hub content, thus offering our users the ability to re-use and re-distribute scholarly works as long as there is proper attribution to the author. We feel strongly that this serves the border community by greatly improving the dissemination, visibility, and impact of research findings.

We will endeavor to improve upon our open access principles, in order to continue to provide our users with access to the best and most current research available.